pop music | BINARYTHIS

“A certain affective reanimation needs to transpire if a disabling political pessimism is to be displaced” – José Esteban Muñoz

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Weighing up her original country fan base versus the gay market?

If you’ve ever been to a Taylor Swift concert, you’ll know that she is not only one of the greatest singer songwriters of our time, she is an industrial complex. The changing merchandise. The cross-promotion. The advertisements. Worth $360M, Swift is number 60 on Forbes‘ dubiously named “self-made women” list (though notably well behind Madonna at 39, Celine Dion at 46, and Beyonce at 51). As one Swiftie tweeted this week – after Taylor announced not one but four versions of her album companion booklet – “You can’t spell capitalism without Taylor Swift”.

Taylor being subtle

So perhaps that’s why when Taylor released the new single from her upcoming album, “You Need To Calm Down” (YNTCD) with its super gay content there was understandable outcry that Taylor is simply trying to cash in on a lucrative gay market (the so-called “pink dollar”). This is a reasonable claim. I doubt that Taylor and her team have ever made any decisions without considering the bottom line.

The whole thing raises the sticky questions of: how can we celebrate queer culture when capitalism is intent on devouring everything good, and selling it back to us? If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, how should we orient toward a distinctly queered Taylor Swift?

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We get it

Some of the answers lie in looking to Taylor’s fandom, specifically those who believe that Taylor is a (closeted) gay icon: the Gaylors. While “capitalist Taylor Swift” is an important reading, it is limited. It misses the impact that Taylor being more overtly queer, rather than just covertly queer (which she has been doing for years, as I have written about previously) has on these queer-reading fans. The online Gaylor community (which is mostly made up of Kaylors – those who believe Taylor and model Karlie Kloss have been in a relationship for years) has spent over a decade dissecting the queer elements of Taylor’s oeuvre.

For these fans (which let’s be real, I am one), Taylor’s new queer-ified era represents a turn from subtext to text, and importantly a big alienating middle finger to Taylor’s conservative fanbase.

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Some of the drag queens from YNTCD

For the Gaylors, Taylor wearing rainbows, promoting the Equality Act, and making a video full of queer people hasn’t been seen as a grab at their cash (which they already give her!) but rather, validation.

This isn’t to suggest that we should defend industrial-complex Taylor simply because she means something to fans, but rather, that this example (like everything under capitalism) exemplifies the contradictions of the system. The pursuit of profit doesn’t bludgeon out all the good things in life, it repackages them. But despite these conditions, human creativity and human relationality relentlessly persists, and breaks through in unexpected ways that show us a glimmer of a different possible world, the one that we might hope for if this wasn’t all enrolled in the machinations of big business.

The scene: described by some as a “gay-lor park”

As José Esteban Muñoz argues in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, we can gain access to a sense of queer utopia in the everyday, even in the face of mass production and consumption. This utopia, as queerness, is a potentiality, always flickering as a promise on the horizon – if we can just learn to see it.

Arguably, Taylor’s YNTCD offers precisely such a glimpse, a queer potentiality that is never fully realised. Of course many commentators might call this “queerbaiting” – because queerness is never solidified into stated identity (Taylor has never identified her sexuality).

She burns it all down

However the call in YNTCD is not to identity but rather a queer utopia, a land (in this iteration, a trailer park) solely dedicated to queer living. Taylor starts by burning down her caravan of normative femininity (read: closet), enters the queer village, dons the colours of the bisexual flag in her hair, and adopts an aesthetic that can only be described as “queer Tumblr circa 2015”.

While this world is populated by celebrity queers, it is no ordinary palatable pride parade. In fact, it’s not a pride parade at all, it’s just queers swanning about and drinking piping hot tea. While some read the anti-gay protestors in the videoclip as specifically classed (“the great unwashed”) we might instead see that the trailer park setting casts the entire scene as the realm of the working class. This makes the sharp political point that not all views are created equal and that reactionary working class ideas should be marginalised (the ideas, not the people – that some of the protestors leave to join the fun at the end is significant).

Kiyoko, also known as Lesbian Jesus

Furthermore, while some commentators called the video “sexless“, this shows a distinct lack of understanding about queer women’s fantasies: Hayley Kiyoko as Legolas; Ellen getting a tattoo while biting her nails short; a food fight a la Fried Green Tomatoes. Plus, there is no corporate sponsorship in this world, and perhaps that is precisely why people read Taylor here as the stand-in for corporate pride. We’re so used to seeing social media companies and big banks as the mode of our queer representation, that YNTCD seemed jarring to people’s queer sensibilities. There must be something wrong! Is it even a stretch to suggest that Taylor makes a nod to the demand for cops out of pride with her line “cop out”? I think not.

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This image screams femme and yes this Gaylor thing is the hill I will die on

Importantly this is a vision of a queer utopia that is not actualised: it doesn’t exist in reality, and is indeed its possibility is threatened under present conditions. But, it offers a hint. When we’re so busy fighting for queer rights (like the Equality Act that Taylor has been plugging) sometimes we forget to stop and imagine exactly what we’d like the world to look like. YNTCD suggests a quotidian garden of gay delights, where even Taylor Swift, everyone’s “classic” het girl, is no longer simply the hen’s night crashing the gay bar, she’s as gay as the gay bar.

So, think on this: queer utopian dreaming with Taylor Swift might open us up to a world of gay visions and fantasies, a different version of the present. It might inspire collective action, be that the resilient queer readings of the Gaylors, or overt advocacy of equality legislation. Much of this might get eaten up and spit back out for consumption. But at the end of the day it’s not that you hate Taylor Swift, it’s that you hate capitalism. Make that your mantra for Monday morning and the queer horizon awaits.

Nostalgia: it’s all the rage

The desire for nostalgia is a funny thing. Studies have found that you’re more likely to seek out nostalgia when you’re feeling down, particularly when you are lonely. Perhaps that’s why society seems to have been on a full-tilt nostalgia trip for some time now: everyone is feeling pretty bummed out about the future to come, and under late neoliberal capitalism more isolated individualistic-thinking than ever before. Here we might turn to Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie to help us. Anomie describes the state of singularity and disconnection felt as a symptom of modernity and rapid social change—anomic societies are highly individualistic and fractured. It would be interesting to take up Durkheim’s analyses of anomic societies here and see just how much financial crises and social upheavals correlate with, say, the sale of Hanson tickets.

Hanson: still looking twelve years old

Going to a concert on a Monday night is strange at the best of times, and this week was certainly a bit odd when I found myself at the anniversary tour of 90s teen-pop boy-band sensation, Hanson. My friend Patrick contacted me months ago to ask me if I wanted to go, and we managed to secure tickets even though the first show had sold out in seconds. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to get a good old dose of nostalgia. But perhaps my initial response to “Do you want to go to Hanson?”—”Lol maybe!”—should have triggered me to remember: when you were a kid you didn’t actually like Hanson.

90s band Steps

Here’s the thing: I didn’t actually like Hanson. I was in year five when they got big (feel free not to do the math on that). I had just moved from a small city to a very small town, and everything I knew about what was cool, and what was what, needed to adjust. I had grown up listening to the national youth radio channel Triple J, and that was my cultural world. When I was eight (again, no math please), I remember being shocked when Kurt Cobain’s death was announced on the radio. That year was also my first concert, the Icelandic singer Bjork’s Post tour. But when I found myself in a small town (at least, in this particular small town), I found out that liking so-called “alternative” music was so not cool. Everyone was into surfing and dancing and hanging out at the beach listening to S.O.A.P. I distinctly remember being invited to a birthday party of a girl in my class and everyone knew the dance moves to 5, 6, 7, 8 by the band Steps, except for me of course. I needed to learn, and I needed to learn fast.

Smash Hits magazine was extremely useful for getting in the know

Luckily my new friend Sally who lived across the road from me knew what was what. And she was obsessed with Hanson. Sally was what they call a “completist“—someone who collects every version of every album and single and other paraphernalia released by a band. In Sally’s case this also extended to buying every magazine and newspaper that featured Zac, Taylor, or Isaac, even if it was a picture of them she already had. Her room was a shrine, perfectly plastered in a way only achievable by meticulously obsessive tweenagers. Sally’s love for Hanson eclipsed any faint glimmer of feeling I might muster myself. Plus, she owned Hanson. Zac specifically.

Nevertheless, Hanson was my gateway drug to the Top 40. I started taping songs off the radio (as you did in those days), and started listening to songs from Aqua, Spice Girls, and Savage Garden. I changed my taste, as much as I could, so at the very least I could get it when the year six girls performed to Backstreet’s Back (though where they were back from I’m still not clear) in the school talent contest, to a standing ovation. I was the Cady Heron, finally able to say “I know this song!” and I could respond “I’m Posh Spice” when someone asked me how I fitted into the scheme of things.

Jordan “Taylor” Hanson

As a skinny nerdy kid with a single mother, monobrow and noticeably second-hand school uniform, pop taste could only help me pass so much. But vindication came in year six when Sally and I performed to Hanson’s Man from Milwaukee (we had to choose this song, as Zac sung it) and we won one of the prizes. “Good job” said my crush outside the canteen, licking a chocolate Paddle Pop. “Really nice” he said, as he brushed aside his Hanson-esque long hair. Pop music was the ticket.

That was, until I was in my mid twenties, dating a musician. This was the period wherein I learned that liking pop music was so not cool. According to this theory, if it wasn’t from Seattle in the 1990s, or wasn’t electronic music created while taking a lot of stimulants, it wasn’t really music. I made mix tapes out of love but they were met with derision. I also learned that a lot of this attitude was just thinly veiled sexism and elitism. How could a woman pop singer possibly be a talented musician? Obviously that bad romance didn’t last, and I decided to embrace pop music more vehemently. But in hindsight I had spent so long worrying about taste and how to achieve it, that I had forgotten what I even liked about music in the first place.

All of this ran through my head on Monday night as I listened to the epic two-hour set from Hanson, which it turns out, is an ample amount of time for 20 years’ worth of triggered memories. I had come for nostalgia, but I had instead been faced with two decades’ worth of feelings around my inadequacies in taste.

Heather Love’s Feeling Backward

The whole thing reminded me of the point that Heather Love makes in her book Feeling Backward: we can’t always “move on” from bad experiences, in fact, it might be worth dwelling awhile in some of these feelings to see how the past is still playing out. As Love states: “It is the damaging aspects of the past that tend to stay with us, and the desire to forget may itself be a symptom of haunting”. Love is talking specifically about the feelings that haunt LGBTQ communities in thinking about the past and the need to attend to, rather than forsake, these memories. But this might also be a lesson for everyone: embrace feeling backward, remember the pain of being a misfit or misunderstood that you’d rather forget. In these memories we might learn something about who we have become, rather than looking for a fantasy hit of nostalgia that can’t ever really deliver us from the present.